At the age of seven, I was introduced to the paranormal ~ the world of ghosts and spirits. I vividly remember the old farm house on the five acre hobby farm we lived in at the time. I shared a room with my younger sister off the rear of the kitchen, next to the back door. At the opposite end of the house a front door stood between the kitchen and the living room.
It was a nightly event that once the house fell silent for the night, the sound of the back door opening and closing, immediately followed by the clear, precise sound of heavy footsteps going down the hall, through the kitchen, and out the front door, could be clearly heard by anyone who was still awake.
My father frequently went away on business trips during this time and it was in his absence that our family would notice the "presence" would be more active. At the kitchen table we would suddenly be overwhelmed by the aroma of men's after shave. Doors would open and close in every room at any time of the day, and on more then one occasion I can recall my mother screaming at the sight of a man standing in the hallway outside her bedroom.
Another house my family lived in while I was growing up had strange things happening too. Certain items would go missing and later turn up in a completely obvious place and my dad would swear that he would sometimes see an old lady sitting in the basement laundry room.
When I first moved out on my own I lived with three other friends in a very old farm house. It was over a hundred years old and we were all renting it together to save money. Every night we would each retire to our separate bedrooms and close the doors. Without fail, every single morning all the doors in the house would be open including the bathroom and pantry.
The floors were old and warped in this house so the pantry door was particularly hard to pull open, you always had to give it an extra pull to get over the raised flooring. Yet, on more then one occasion, someone would be standing at the stove, opposite the pantry, cooking dinner, and the pantry door would glide open with ease on its own, as you stood there and watched in awe.
Or we would all be sitting in the living room watching television when suddenly we would look at each other as if we just noticed somebody strange enter the room. None of us actually saw any one, but we would all swear we knew some one was there, sitting in a rocking chair right along beside us.
After I was married, I lived in a house where things went missing again. It was during this time that my father died and my children were very young, 4 & 5 years old, and soon after, I started hearing voices. Mainly my daughters voice but she was definitely talking to someone else. Of course I went to see who it was, but she was sitting on the bed by herself when I entered the room. I asked her who she was talking too and she insisted it was her grandpa. After my divorce, I lived in a house where stress and tension was strong. In this house physical things began to happen. Like a giant plant that had sat in a pot on the living room floor for years, suddenly falls over for no reason at all in front of myself and my daughter.
Another time we were baking in the kitchen when the mixer, which was laying on the counter, acted up. First the cord came flying out of the socket on the wall, then the mixer itself went sailing across the kitchen and landed on the floor beside us.
Or the time we got up in the morning and the pantry cupboard had been completely re-arranged exactly opposite of the way I had left it. Instead of the cereal being on the lowest shelf for the children to reach, it was now on the top shelf.
Occurrences like this have been happening around me my entire life and there are far too many more to mention. But they did spark my curiosity into learning more about the paranormal world of ghosts and spirits because the one thing I did notice is that every house was unique unto itself and the ghostly activity and behavior was quite different. Maybe I was being followed?
It was obvious to me that the spirit world existed, but I had always thought that a ghost and a spirit were the same thing. I have since come to learn that they are very different from each other and some of my experiences have been ghostly while others have been spiritual.
